Talking Trumpism: A New Political Journal Enters the Fray

William F. Buckley Jr. said he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But one evening late last month, the Harvard Club in Midtown was as good a place as any to go looking for the intellectual future of conservatism.

The occasion was the unveiling of American Affairs, a tweedy quarterly journal dedicated to giving intellectual heft and coherence to the amorphous ideology known, for lack of a better term, as Trumpism.

Not that the words “Donald Trump” came up during the presentation, though Julius Krein, the journal’s 31-year-old founder and editor, did pay the man sideways tribute with a quotation from the French critic Roland Barthes’s classic 1957 essay “The World of Wrestling.”

“Our politics, like Barthes’s wrestling, has become a spectacle of excess, which has no sense of time, and no logic of the future,” Mr. Krein said, drawing a chuckle from the crowd of more than 100. He then turned to a dead-serious matter: rethinking the entire post-Cold War policy consensus.

“We in America no longer have any idea what the future should be, much less how to build it together,” he said.

That’s big talk for a quarterly with an initial print run of 300 copies and whose first issue mixes articles on economics and international affairs with more abstract offerings like a disquisition on Hegel and work. But the history of modern conservatism is paved with journals whose influence belied their small circulations, including The Public Interest, which became the chief organ of neoconservatism in the 1970s and ’80s, and National Affairs, founded in 2009 to promote “reform conservatism.”

In an interview, Mr. Krein semi-jokingly described the journal as aiming to appeal to fans of both Foreign Affairs and the Slovenian Marxist provocateur Slavoj Zizek. More seriously, he said, the magazine seeks to fill the void left by a conservative intellectual establishment more focused on opposing Mr. Trump than on grappling with the rejection of globalism and free-market dogma that propelled his victory.

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Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president and chief executive of the left-leaning think tank New America, and Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Trump supporter, at the Harvard Club, where American Affairs was unveiled.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times

“A lot of people on the right are looking back and seeing an agenda that is a complete failure, presided over by a bunch of nonentities,” he said. “It’s a joke.”

So far, the right is definitely reading. Matthew Continetti of The Washington Free Beacon, in an article reposted by National Review, called the first issue “lively and thought-provoking and at times deeply insightful.” Ross Douthat of The New York Times, a strong critic of Mr. Trump, noted the journal in a recent column, though he called the ideas on offer “not quite as daring as I had hoped.”

Over on the left, Jeet Heer ofThe New Republic was less appreciative. High-toned discussion of “civic friendship” and “covenantal nationalism,” Mr. Heer said, effectively “whitewashes” Mr. Trump’s “racial demagoguery” and authoritarianism and “aims to hoodwink elite conservatives into believing that Trump is just like them.”

Mr. Krein says the point is exactly the opposite. “Trump is not like them, and that’s what makes him attractive — at least on a policy basis,” he said.

He continued: “There has to be a sense of a distinct political community. I don’t think it has to be ethnic or racial, but there has to be a distinct American citizenship that matters.”

Mr. Krein grew up in Eureka, S.D., and studied political philosophy at Harvard with the noted conservative scholar Harvey C. Mansfield before going into finance, working at Bank of America, the Blackstone Group and smaller firms. (He now works full-time on the journal.)

He’s also a skilled connector, as the crowd at the Harvard Club attested. The main event was a discussion of globalization between Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Trump supporter, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president and chief executive of the left-leaning think tank New America. (Mr. Krein said he met Mr. Thiel several years ago though a reading group dedicated to the philosopher Leo Strauss.)

During the cocktail hour, Mr. Thiel chatted with the philanthropist and Trump donor Rebekah Mercer, while writers and editors from The Washington Free Beacon, First Things, National Review, The American Conservative and other mostly right-of-center outlets worked the room.

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Stacks of American Affairs journals.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times

William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, a staunch Never-Trumper, summed up the crowd as “a mix of normal people who come to conservative events, some interesting people who are distinctively Trumpian and a few lunatics.”

And himself? “I’m representing the deep state,” Mr. Kristol joked.

The journalist Michael Lind, a member of the magazine’s advisory board (and a former conservative turned advocate of “liberal nationalism”), credited Mr. Krein with “trying to scramble the categories of left, right and center.”

“We’ve already seen a partisan realignment,” Mr. Lind said. “What we’re now seeing is an intellectual realignment, as both parties’ intellectuals try to catch up with their bases.”

American Affairs grew out of The Journal of American Greatness, a pseudonymously written blog that Mr. Krein — a sometime contributor to The Weekly Standard — and others started last spring, out of frustration that no outlet wanted to publish their long, learned, Trump-tolerant essays. (It abruptly shut down in June, declaring that what began as an “inside joke” had started being taken too seriously; another offshoot, American Greatness, set up shop in July.)

The site is most famous for publishing Publius Decius Mus, the pseudonymous author of the incendiary pro-Trump essay “The Flight 93 Election,” who was unmasked last month as Michael Anton, who is now a senior staff member at the National Security Council. Mr. Krein, who wrote as Plautus, said his own favorite contributions included “The Red Album,” a satire of “#NeverTrump paranoia” modeled paragraph-by-paragraph on Joan Didion’s classic essay “The White Album.”

The first issue of American Affairs is similarly eclectic, if more squarely in the policy journal tradition. Mr. Anton wrote a critique of “the liberal international order,” and the economist David P. Goldman, better known for his columns under the pen name Spengler, contributed a chart-heavy essay on technology and the United States. Mr. Krein’s essay on James Burnham’s critique of the “managerial elite” takes whacks at both parties.

The second issue, Mr. Krein said, will include more surprises, mixing newcomers with some prominent names one wouldn’t expect to see there. As for the biggest name in American politics, Mr. Krein said the magazine took no “intellectual cues” from President Trump.

“These are our ideas,” he said. “We hope there’s some overlap, but we aren’t going to sit around cheerleading the administration.”